Group items tagged

The phase of democratic consolidation can significantly impact the motives, dynamics and objectives of civil society. Its internal roles, dynamics and power balances are significantly altered by the advent of democracy, due to shifting resources, politica

Pakistan narrowly avoided turning a political stand-off into a full-blown constitutional crisis this week (see the ever-useful POMED roundup), not least due to the critical role played by civil society, especially the independent lawyers' movement.

Despite the government of Canada's close relationship with the biotechnology industry, critical social movement organisations have had a significant impact on the adoption of genetically modified organisms in that country. Two cases of products rejected after widespread resistance - recombinant bovine growth hormone (1999) and herbicide-tolerant Roundup Ready (RR) Wheat (2004) - are revisited. Informed by empirical research that brings to light new factors shaping the RR wheat outcome in particular, two theoretical arguments are advanced. First, in response to those critics of a neo-Gramscian framing of hegemony who see it as overly deterministic, these cases highlight just how deeply alliances with hegemonic ambitions may be forced to compromise. Second, these cases demonstrate that any study of civil society must still pay close attention to institutional and material 'relations of force' when seeking to explain the impact of social movements on environmental governance.

"Extensive socio-ethnographic fieldwork among nongovernmental organizations, international donor agencies, and Church-related organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, suggests that global civil society-as an imagined terrain of transnational social action-can be viewed both as a site of expanded possibilities for social action and as a source of significant new constraints. It is a terrain where not all ideas and values are heard, promoted, or given legitimacy. There is, however, a transnationally resonant language into which Southern activists need to translate their issues and concerns if they wish to be heard."

While the transnational public sphere has existed in the Arendtian sense at least since the mid-19th century, a new kind of reflexively political global civil society emerged in the late 20th century. However, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), advocacy groups, and networks have limited agendas and legitimacy and, without the support of at least one state, limited means to realise changes. Since 2001, theWorld Social Forum (WSF) has formed a key attempt in forging links and ties of solidarity among diverse actors. Although the WSF may seem a party of opinion when defined negatively against neoliberal globalisation, imperialism, and violence, in more positive ideological terms it remains a rather incoherent collection of diverse actors; while itself defined as a mere open space. There is a quest for new forms of agency such as a world political party. Various historical predecessors of global political parties, real and imagined, provide conceptual resources, useful experiences for envisaging the structure, and function of a possible planetary partyformation. H.G. Wells's 'open conspiracy' is a particularly important future-oriented leftdemocratic vision. Wells believed that only a mass movement of truly committed individuals and groups could have the power to transform the world political organisation, by creating a democratic world commonwealth. Recently, for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have formulated similar ideas. I argue that transformative political agency presupposes a shared programme, based on common elements of a wider and deeper world-view, and willingness to engage in processes of collective will-formation in terms of democratic procedures. From this perspective, I outline a possible organisation and some substantial directions for a global political party. The point is also to respond to the criticism of existing parties and cultivate the critical-pluralist ethos of global civil society, but in terms of democratic party-formation

Prominent postcolonial thinker Partha Chatterjee's concept of political society is an important one in understanding the vast domain of politics in the 'Third World' which falls outside hegemonic Western notions of the state and civil society. This domain

This handbook aims primarily to create a record of mass attitudes of citizens in selected African countries towards democracy, markets, civil society, and other aspects of civil-state relations. However, while there has been a great deal of information on

"The military regimes of 1964-1989 in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil implemented a code of legitimacy that appealed to various secular beliefs rooted in civil society at the same time that they fostered a common myth of religious legitimation-that of defending "Western Christian civilization." It was under this umbrella that military groups and religious actors faced each other and/or established alliances. In this cultural politics, religious actors that had previously been excluded from the power game sought to support and/or be recognized by the state as allies in the construction of a belief in the legitimacy of the dictatorships."

"Democracy, civil society and likewise their 'promotion' have for a long time shaped foreign policies inside as much as outside the countries of the Middle East. Since January 2011, however, these notions and policies have been challenged by a seemingly new concept, that of the 'Arab Youth'. While the term 'Arab Youth' is coined to denote the grassroots nature of the uprisings, as a political category it may be reinforcing the paternalistic presumptions of authoritarian regimes and global hegemonic power structures, which use it to undermine the capacity of the wider population for democratic change. Without empirically grounded and theoretically challenging works, 'Arab Youth' may perpetuate the same inequalities and top-down misunderstanding that 'democracy promotion' connotes within the Middle East. By locating Syrian youth within contemporary struggles through ethnographic case studies, this paper aims to sketch a nuanced, complex and colourful picture of the multifaceted ways that young people reinforce, resist and negotiate power relations in contemporary Syria. Specifically, it looks at youth responses to different forms of authority such as external power (Israeli occupation), the Syrian state and the authority of parents and sectarian communities."

The papers included in this volume were originally presented at an international conference on the theme 'Democracy, Development and Civil Society in India' hosted by the University of Melbourne in September 2007. The conference brought together scholars

In recent years the United Nations Environment Program, UN Conference on Environment and Development, and other international organizations have acknowledged the importance of civil society for engaging stakeholders in environmental change-especially at t

This article addresses the issue of the challenges of democracy building and the role of civil society in this process by focusing on three countries in southeastern Europe, Albania, Bulgaria, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Since the 1990s

This paper begins with delineating the emergence and transformation of the discourses of 'popular democracy', and the formulation and debate over 'civil society'. This is followed by an account of the subsequent incorporation of social movements and the a

Jan Aart Scholte from the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, asked if the voices that the civil society groups emphasise so much did not just mean the urban, western-educated elites but included less articulate grass roots groups that remain

Over the past three decades, China has been undergoing tremendous transformations in nearly every domain of social, economic, and political life. These rapid changes offer both new challenges and opportunities for China scholars to reflect upon the relevance and analytical power of many existing theoretical frameworks and categories in this new context. There have been desires and efforts to search for innovative or alternative conceptual lenses in order to better understand the emerging, heterogeneous social configurations and make sense of the contemporary conditions of life presented by China and beyond. Carolyn Hsu's thoughtful article (Hsu, 2010) is a useful and welcome experiment in this direction. I very much appreciate the opportunity to engage her work in a constructive spirit.

Beginning in 1961 there have been repeated calls in Guyana, one of the most ethnically divided societies, for either modification or abolishment of the Westminster model, in particular its winner-take-all and government-opposition component, and its replacement with a consociational power sharing model; but after almost five decades, a power sharing government has not materialized. This paper examines the various proposals and initiatives to tease out their content, the motivation behind them, the discourse they spawned and the possible reasons for their failure to evolve into actual power sharing governments. The paper makes four major arguments. First, there has been a general desire for national reconciliation, mainly on the part of civil society actors and parties that embrace multiethnicity as a guiding philosophy. Second, while the major political parties have supported power sharing in principle, they have been reluctant to embrace it fully when in office. Third, political parties have been reluctant to subordinate their agendas and programs to a common national agenda. Fourth, although some political actors support the need for ethnic unity and peace, they have been reluctant to relinquish their fidelity to some core tenets of liberal democracy.

This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization's impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while others mobilize a transnational civil society. Research we review generally points to liabilities of neoliberal globalization for workers. To understand these findings, we apply Karl Polanyi's concepts of fictitious commodities, the self-regulating market, and the double movement. We propose that, on the one hand, the activities of MNCs, international financial organizations, and many states exemplify pushes for institutional separation of economy and society in effort to institutionalize the idea of a self-regulating market at a global scale, which increases labor commodification and global inequalities. On the other hand, the activities of social movements, including unions and transnational actors that target globalization's impact on work, constitute the counter movement at national and global levels resisting marketization and pushing for labor decommodification. The aftermath of the ongoing economic crisis will tell to what extent this countermovement will be successful in generating an alternative to neoliberal globalization, and more protections for workers.

Strengthening civil society has had a prominent place in the international community's strategy for the West Balkans. Rather than creating an independent and sustainable NGO sector, however, it has made local NGOs largely dependent on the international co

"Since the 1990s, India has faced heavy criticism for its realist approach to Burmese affairs. Geopolitical imperatives indeed drove Delhi towards a closer partnership with its military-ruled neighbour. India, however, claims it plays a key role in fostering development in Burma; therefore, consolidating long-term democratization prospects there. This article aims to challenge this view. Using the literature on development and democracy, as well as interviews with Indian policy-makers, it will explore India's recent engagement with the Burmese socioeconomic landscape, and assess its democratizing impact. It argues that, despite an evident discourse shift since cyclone Nargis in 2008, India's development and infrastructure projects remain low-key and peripheral, its education and health assistance marginal and its transnational connections with the emerging Burmese civil society absent. India's own dilemmatic approach combined with Burmese traditional resistance impedes a broader Indian leverage. Unless a more diverse socioeconomic involvement is offered by Delhi in Burma and more knowledge about its evolving polity is nurtured at home, India will neither pave the way for pluralism to grow there nor alleviate its deep-rooted image deficit there."

"This article examines the role of the new media in the 'Arab Spring' in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that although the new media is one of the factors in the social revolution among others such as social and political factors in the region, it nevertheless played a critical role especially in light of the absence of an open media and a civil society. The significance of the globalization of the new media is highlighted as it presents an interesting case of horizontal connectivity in social mobilization as well signaling a new trend in the intersection of new media and conventional media such as television, radio, and mobile phone. One of the contradictions of the present phase of globalization is that the state in many contexts facilitated the promotion of new media due to economic compulsion, inadvertently facing the social and political consequences of the new media."